


Pillow Talk

by bonestrewn



Category: Wentworth (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-24
Updated: 2017-07-24
Packaged: 2018-12-06 12:59:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11601156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bonestrewn/pseuds/bonestrewn
Summary: "Vera told me of her dreams. Head pillowed on my shoulder, one hand tracing patterns on my chest, she poured out all the details, guileless as a schoolgirl confessing to her diary." Some nonsense, probably set mid-season 2.





	Pillow Talk

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first FreakyTits fic, and I'm still grappling a bit with Joan and Vera as characters. Normally I'm not a first-person fic kinda gal, but this came to me really easily once I started conceptualizing it as one of Joan's pretentious villain monologues. :P I hope you enjoy!

Vera told me of her dreams.

Head pillowed on my shoulder, one hand tracing patterns on my chest, she poured out all the details, guileless as a schoolgirl confessing to her diary. At night, her dream-self returned to the halls of Wentworth. She would be summoned by radio to the kitchen or the exercise yard, needing to break up a brawl, only to find once she’d arrived that she’d forgotten something vital.

“Sometimes,” she said, and laughed, “it’s that I’m naked. Or I’ve—I’ve got everything on but my skirt.”

“How would you have gotten past the front desk?” I worked a curl of her hair around my finger. “Do you think I’d let you work like that? What is your impression of my standards, Vera?”

She laughed again. I liked that sound. I always knew how to bring it out of her. I imagined her a little puppet, answering every twitch I made on her strings.

“It’s a _dream,_ ” she said. “Dreams don’t have to make sense.”

“No.” Dreams came from the lowest levels of the human mind, and in those spaces—in its furthest, shadowy parts—the human mind itself did not answer to logic. It answered to emotion. Most human minds did, anyway. “Go on. You’ve got everything on but your skirt.”

“Well, all the prisoners turn, and I…” She paused. Her finger stilled, mid-curlicue on my sternum. “It’s always… The moment that I realize. That’s what I remember most from my dreams. They’re all looking at me, and I realize I’ve…”

She didn’t need to go on. I understood. I could see it clearly: the eyes of the prisoners gleaming with gleeful recognition, Vera standing there under Wentworth’s cruel fluorescent lights like an insect under a microscope with her bare legs and her little panties showing. How they would laugh. Humiliation was the heart of it, for Vera. The dark channels, the oldest landscapes of her mind, the ones that produced her dreams—they had been shaped by her mother.

“Anyway, I’ve…” She shook her head slightly. “What do you dream about, Joan?”

I looked down at her, and traced the contour of her cheek. “What do you think?”

She turned her head toward my touch, but her gaze stayed on my face. I could see her trying to read me, wondering if this was some kind of test. Her blue eyes were so transparent. I wondered what it was like to live so close to the surface of oneself. So clearly seen. So exposed.

“Duty rosters,” she said. Her smile reappeared, teeth in her lower lip. “Induction reports.” I let myself smile, just a little, and watched her react to the pull of her string. She moved closer, her smile widening, draping the warm weight of her arm over me. “A _really_ good bottle of Shiraz.”

Vera propped herself up over me. Moonlight limned the tumbling locks of her hair and the barest edge of her profile. I could no longer quite see her eyes, but I could see, suggested in light and shadow, that smile.

She leaned down to give me one of her candy-sweet kisses. So earnest, always. I really believed that one day she might reach out to hold my hand as we walked through Wentworth, like girlfriends on a date.

Her face was close to mine, her breath on my lips, when she suggested, “Me?”

My dreams were not like hers. I dreamt mostly in memories: The flat featureless faces of the waterfront buildings in Korsakov. My first birthday after coming to Australia, and the taste of my birthday cake, which I ate until I made myself sick. My father’s echoing voice. _Worthless. Pointless. Get up, Joan._ And—sometimes—I dreamt of my mother.

The parts of Vera that made her dreams had been shaped by her mother; mine had to have done the same for me. It seemed possible that my mind could produce something, anything with her stamp on it. That I might dream of her face, someday.

Logic, not emotion.

I couldn’t see Vera’s eyes, but I knew their hopeful gaze. She was waiting for me to tell her something sweet. I stroked the pads of my fingers down her neck, along the slope of her shoulder. I had left a bite mark there earlier. Tomorrow, it would burn under her uniform.

I pressed down on my mark. Vera hissed, fidgeting on top of me. Her bare skin was soft against mine, and everywhere she moved, it struck sparks. “I suspect, Vera, that _you_ dream of _me_.”

“Sometimes,” she said. She twitched her hair back, revealing her face to the light, but I already knew the look there. Shy. For a woman who craved close attention, she was nervous under the gaze. She knew it made her vulnerable to hurt, but couldn’t resist the possibility of a caress instead of a blow.

“Sometimes,” I echoed. She was still watching me with those eyes full of hope. I knew what she wanted. How could I fail to know when her face telegraphed every thought? When she gave herself away so freely?

She wanted me to push. To make her speak. To unravel her. To make vulnerable all her sensitive parts, and to give her that caress she so craved.

It was our game, and it should have bored me. _She_ should have bored me. I’d met a hundred innocents before her and found them all lacking, their trivial fantasies, their cheap, unimpressive sameness. But I cupped her cheek and brushed my thumb over her lip, and watched her eyelashes flutter, and against all logic, I wasn't bored.

Against all logic, my heart beat faster as her teeth scraped delicately over the pad of my thumb.

"Show me," I said. She did.


End file.
